


Friends With Your Parents

by CaptainJZH



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Best Friends, But only imaginatively, But she would have loved Steven, Connie is a good friend, Friendship, Gen, Mommy Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Rose had issues, Spoilers for Episode: s05e26 Familiar, introspective fluff, is that a thing?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 00:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17193140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainJZH/pseuds/CaptainJZH
Summary: If you were a kid at the same time as your parents, could you have been friends?Steven asks this question himself one night, and Connie provides a reassuring answer.





	Friends With Your Parents

Steven couldn’t sleep. 

 

Of course, this was partly due to being on an alien planet billions of lightyears from home, with the weight of the world on his shoulders for what felt like the tenth time this month, but that wasn’t the primary reasoning for  _ this  _ night’s bout of insomnia. He was tucked away in his sleeping bag, Connie in her own just a few feet from him while the Gems prepared for tomorrow’s meeting with the Diamonds in the other room.

 

A question kept repeating itself over and over in his head. Ever since he began exploring Pink Diamond’s chambers, finding her old drawings of her fellow Diamonds, meeting the Pebbles...well, he just couldn’t shake it. He needed to talk about it, at least.

 

“Hey, Connie?” he whispered.

 

“Yeah?” she asked in return, turning over to face him.

 

“I guess you can’t sleep either,” he chuckled.

 

“Heh, I guess not,” she said, looking over at the boy with such interest. “What’s on your mind?”

 

Steven laid back onto his sleeping bag, thinking of the right way to phrase it. Ultimately, he decided to bite the bullet and start talking.

 

“You ever wonder about, like, what your parents were like when they were your age?”

 

Connie sat back as well and stared up at the ceiling in thought.

 

“A little, yeah,” she finally said. “I once found my mom’s middle school yearbook up in the attic, and well, turned out she was class president way back when. I don’t even know the name of  _ my _ class president, so I guess I just got to wondering about what that meant, ya know?”

 

“Do you ever think about if you could have been friends with your parents?”

 

“What?” Connie replied without thinking.

 

“Sorry, sorry, that was a dumb question,” Steven shook his head.

 

“No, no,” Connie reassured him, sitting back up, “That’s...actually kinda it. I know my mom’s pretty strict with me, and it kinda stinks, but she couldn’t have always been that way, right? I kinda wonder what it’d be like if...”

 

“...If you were friends?”

 

Connie paused, turning to Steven. “You’ve been thinking about it, too.”

 

Steven sat up and chuckled. “I guess you wouldn’t believe that it just came to my mind at random, huh?”

 

The girl gave him a knowing look. She knew him so well, didn’t she?

 

“Yeah… I guess I was looking through mom’s old stuff, from when she was Pink Diamond, and I… Well, remember back when Stevonnie had that dream?”

 

“I remember,” Connie nodded.

 

“She was so excited by everything!” Steven continued. “She was curious, and goofy, and silly and no one took her seriously, even when it mattered! And, well… I guess I saw a lot of myself in that.”

 

Connie smiled, thinking back to the young boy she met in a bubble two years back. 

 

“You were a bit less temperamental than she was,” she pointed out.

 

“Must have gotten patience from my dad,” Steven mused. “But anyway, then I started thinking about how much I didn’t know how to feel about my mom before now. And now I’m suddenly relating to her, like, a  _ lot,  _ and I wonder…”   
  
Steven paused, lost in thought.

 

“You wonder...?” Connie asked, snapping him back to reality.

 

“If I knew that version of my mom, and we were just...two kids— if she wasn’t Pink Diamond and I wasn’t her son —could we have been friends?”

 

Connie thought for a moment before answering. Her first instinct was to insist that his mother loved him, but he didn’t want to hear  _ that.  _ He’d probably heard that a million times, and it didn’t even answer his question. But then she thought about their experience from Stevonnie’s dream. Normally, seeing through someone else’s eyes would have been disconcerting to think back to, but instead of feeling alien, when they were Pink Diamond it felt so... _ Steven.  _

 

“I think,” she began, “You two would have got along great.”

 

Steven smiled. “You think?”

 

“Yeah! Honestly, you’d probably rub off on her.”

 

“In a good way?”

 

“Of  _ course  _ in a good way, Steven! You’re the best person I know.”

 

“Oh,  _ stop,”  _ Steven laughed.

 

“You’d eat Cookie Cats together, play video games, read comics, you could listen to each other’s problems, you’d gush about Crying Breakfast Friends together… You’d be great friends!”

 

“Yeah… I guess we would...” Steven thought aloud, laying back in bed. “Connie?”

 

“Uh-huh?”

 

“Thanks. For being my friend and all.”

 

“Ditto,” Connie said before laying back in bed as well.

 

“Good night, Connie.”

 

“Night, Steven.”

 

And that night, as Steven fell asleep in the palace of Pink Diamond, dreams of him and his mom playing on the beach back home filled his head.

**Author's Note:**

> This was partly inspired, believe it or not, by something Back to the Future writer Bob Gale said once; He recalled how one day, like Connie in this story, he found out his dad was president of his class, and thought back to his own class president, whom he had no connection to. And so he began thinking about if he and his dad went to high school together, if they could have been friends, which eventually gave us Back to the Future.
> 
> And with Familiar showcasing just how similar Pink's and Steven's family situations were, I began thinking about that, and here we are :)


End file.
